The night before, on his direct instruction, almost half his cabinet, including Mary Harney, Noel Dempsey, Dermot Ahern and Tony Killeen, had resigned. But now, as Cowen revealed in his call to Lenihan, their junior coalition partners, the Greens, were causing trouble.

"The f**king Greens are at it again, and now they are saying they'll stop us replacing those who have resigned," Lenihan told me the Taoiseach had said.

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